When Charles Gilmore described the first complete pachycephalosaur skull in 1924, he found himself i
When Charles Gilmore described the first complete pachycephalosaur skull in 1924, he found himself in the position of describing the first-ever pachycephalosaur teeth to be discovered. However, there is another group of dinosaurs - the troodonts - that were, up to his time, known only from teeth, and the teeth of the two groups look extremely similar. As both groups often occurred in the same time and place, Gilmore made the natural connection that Troodon teeth represented the teeth of Stegoceras, and accordingly wrote:Our knowledge of both Troodon and Stegoceras has remained in thisuncertain condition up to the present time, and it is therefore, with greatsatisfaction that I announce the presence in the specimen in the Universityof Alberta of premaxillary teeth that are generically indistinguishablefrom Leidy’s type of Troodon[…]We now know that Troodon was a lightweight, birdlike animal that looked almost nothing like Stegoceras, a heavyset, dome-headed ornithischian. Whoops. -- source link
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